'We all share the blame for Darfur'

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While the United Nations debates whether the murder of 50,000 people in the African nation of Sudan is genocide or merely mass slaughter, people keep dying and Australian doctors such as Rick Brennan keep trying to keep them alive.

Sydney-raised emergency physician Brennan, 44, is the health director of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organisation that helps refugees fleeing persecution and war.

He has recently returned from four weeks touring the camps of the Darfur region in the north-west of Sudan, establishing badly needed medical clinics.

The UN last year described Sudan's as "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world" and yet, Brennan says, the international community's response has been "negligent".

"Everyone has a responsibility here and no one is doing the right thing," he said in an email from his New York headquarters last week. "We all carry our share of the blame."

The history, in a nutshell is this: Sudan, south of Egypt, has been engaged in a civil war for 20 years between the government-backed Arab Muslim north and the black African oil-rich south, where people are Christian or practise traditional faiths.

In 2002, a peace of sorts was brokered between the Sudanese People's Liberation Army rebels and the Government. But in the north-west Darfur region last year, tensions between black farmers and nomadic Arabs - both groups Muslim - exploded into an orgy of violence and ethnic cleansing. A well-armed Arab militia called the Janjaweed launched the terror, with the approval of the Government, razing villages, shooting the men, gang-raping the women, burning children alive and firing on fleeing villagers from helicopter gun-ships. More than a million people have been displaced.

Brennan, son of 2GB radio program director John Brennan, trained at Westmead and North Shore hospitals before heading to trouble spots overseas.

When he arrived in South Darfur in August, refugees had received no health care or food aid for four months.

"Death rates in some areas have been reported up to seven times normal," he said. "While most deaths were originally due to violence, the vast majority are now due to infectious diseases (especially malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia) and malnutrition.

"The overcrowding, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care and malnutrition have all contributed to outbreaks of measles, dysentery and now hepatitis E."

Many of the refugees are women, children and the elderly. Brennan has heard of women branded after being raped, "so that they would be physically scarred and humiliated for life".

"I met one young woman whose husband was killed by the Janjaweed and she is now pregnant after being raped during an attack on her village," he said.

"In Abu Shouk [refugee] camp, a six-year-old girl was raped and two women were also raped while they walked to fetch firewood."

In the midst of such tragedy, Brennan's team brings order. "The good news is that we can save many lives by simple, cost-effective interventions such as vaccinations, clean water, nutritious food, sanitation, basic medical care and reproductive health services, including emergency obstetric care.

"We have already seen a stabilisation of health problems in Abu Shouk camp, where mortality rates have reduced to normal levels."

The most urgent need is security and what Brennan calls "humanitarian space" so agencies can have safe access to refugees.

The UN is proving feeble, its reputation tarnished by the Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal, in which billions of dollars were skimmed in bribes by corrupt UN officials and contractors to provide luxuries for Saddam Hussein instead of food for starving children.

Last month the UN Security Council passed a resolution threatening the Sudanese Government with sanctions if the carnage continued. But there is cynicism about the vested interests of Russia and China in oilfields and arms supply. In the US there is pressure building to send troops.

"If the perceived interests of the powerful countries were more of an issue in Darfur there is no doubt there would be a much more robust response," said Brennan.

"If the victims of the crisis were white and looked like us, there would be far less ignorance and indifference among our public and there would be far greater pressure on our politicians to do something." After the Rwanda genocide of 1994 the UN admitted it was "timid, disorganised and misguided" in failing to intervene to stop the killings. Just six months ago, Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said: "I realised after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support."

Brutal killers will die in jail - amen

It took 31 years, but Brian Morse could finally rest easy knowing the men who tortured, raped and murdered his wife Virginia will die in jail.

The High Court, in a 6-1 decision, dismissed the last appeal of killer Allan Baker, thus affirming legislation passed by the Carr Government, aimed at keeping Baker and nine other men in jail.

"It's been a very happy morning for me," Morse, 68, a farmer-turned real-estate agent, said on Friday. "All my emotions have been pent up for so long. I can't believe that this is the end of the road." He was phoned with the good news by Premier Bob Carr and he, in turn, phoned former Opposition leader Kerry Chikarovski to thank her for what became a bipartisan resolve in 2001 to keep Baker and his accomplice Kevin Crump behind bars.

The legislation applies also to the killers of Anita Cobby and Janine Balding. When Morse rang Cobby's parents Grace and Peter Lynch and Balding's mother Bev they were "overjoyed". Morse found happiness again with his second wife, Pammy, a widow with two sons, Andrew and Anthony. But the legal process has been especially hard on his children, Eloise, Adrian and Robert, who were 12, 10 and five when their mother was abducted from the family farm in Collarenebri in 1973.

Morse said: "You get to the stage where you only remember the loss of Virginia and all the terrible things.

"I was fortunate to be married for 13 very happy years and we had three wonderful kids."

The sentencing judge, the late Justice Robert Taylor, ordered that Baker and Crump "should spend the rest of your lives in jail and there you should die". If they tried to have their sentence reduced, they should be "shown the same clemency and mercy" they showed Virginia as, in a state "beyond tears", she begged to return to her children. Finally the judge's words have been heeded.